Book Review: Who by Geoff Smart & Randy Street
Solve your #1 Problem
WHO
by Geoff Smart & Randy Street
Book Review by Hazel Jackson, CEO of biz-group
This is not the first time I’ve come across the practices recommended by Geoff Smart. They were in fact initially created by his father Brad Smart and called it Topgrading. Topgrading is a reference in the book, but they have simplified the process and helped you through a series of steps that make real sense.
I would preface the whole content of the book, by saying it is really directed at the recruitment of managers and senior executives, more than every position. I believe we can take elements across all levels of an organization, but where it is particularly powerful is your top tier executives. Get them wrong and you can lose millions.
The Economist describes unsuccessful hiring as “the single biggest problem in business today”. Statistics researched by the authors show that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50% and that the average hiring mistake cost 15 times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss.
Who mistakes happen when managers:
- Are unclear about what is needed in a job
- Have a weak flow of candidates
- Do not trust their ability to pick out the right candidate from a group of similar looking candidates
- Lose candidates they really want to join their team
I enjoyed one of their vivid stories about CVs. What is a resume? It is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all of the failures removed! One CEO interviewed for the book, shared a story where he finally had to admit that he asked the employee to leave the firm “Look, I hired your resume. But unfortunately, what I got was you!”
Smart and Street share the top ten voodoo hiring mistakes, I’ve picked five I’ve come across the most in the region:
- The Art Critic – when judging art, going on gut instinct can work out fine but it is terribly inaccurate when it comes to hiring someone.
- The Sponge – many managers meet the candidate with the objective of absorbing as much information as possible. However it is rarely a co-ordinated approach and so everyone asks the same information and they rarely go deeper than “He’s a good guy!”
- The Suitor – Rather than rigorously interviewing a candidate, managers spend all their energy selling the applicant on the opportunity. They might land their fair share of candidates, but they take their chances with them being a really good fit.
- The Aptitude Tester. Tests can help managers but should never become the sole determinant for a hiring decision. Use them to screen, but not in isolation.
- The Fortune Teller – some interviewers ask candidates questions that are hypothetical “What would you do if…?” “How would you resolve this issue…?” Their answers may sound nice, but it’s the walk that counts not the talk.
This is all of the not to do. But the power of the book is providing you with the practical steps and techniques for searching and selecting the right people.
Smart and Street break down the chapters to their A method of hiring with 4 stages.
They say you need to hire A Players – a talented person who can do the job you need done, while fitting in with the culture of your company. This definition is further clarified by Smart – a candidate who as at least a 90% chance of achieving a set of outcomes that one the top 10% of possible candidates could achieve. It took me a while to wrap my head around that statement but finally it made sense.
Scorecard – is a document that describes exactly what you want a person to achieve in the role. It goes beyond a job description, something more commonly used in the UAE. It is a set of outcomes and competencies that define a job well done, effectively the blueprint for the job.
There are three components to an effective score card and one action step:
Mission - linked to the company’s purpose this is the heart of the job. Watch out for gobbledygook. It must make sense. You’ll know you have it right if recruiters, team members and candidates don’t have to ask clarifying questions. The book provides examples.
Outcomes – they recommend three to eight outcomes ranked in order of importance that are clearly measurable. For example Increase EBITDA margin from 9% to 15% by end of year three. Set the outcomes high enough – but still within reason – and you’ll scare off B and C players even as you pull in the kind of A Players who thrive on big challenges. Rather than focusing on what you will be doing, the outcomes focus on what a person must get done.
Competencies (typically this is the only one provided in a JD) – ensuring behavioral fit. The mission defines the essence of the job with a high degree of specificity. Outcomes describe what must be accomplished. Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate.
The authors provide a list of critical competencies complied through their research with 300 CEO’s what A player’s needs. Included in this list is the recommendation that a company provide their core values. It is just as important that the candidate meets those as the competencies for the job. Scorecards will become the guardians of your culture.
Ensure Alignment & Communicate – finally you should pressure test your scorecard. It should align with the business plan and strategy and interface correctly with other scorecards for managers. Then make sure you share it with all relevant parties.
This is a key step missed by many companies, who then wonder why the new manager is not integrating well.
Source – finding great people is getting harder, but not impossible. Virtual benching or finding people before you have vacancies, mainly through your existing A players is their key recommended approach.
However what typically happens is a vacancy opens and the manager panics. He calls HR for help. HR asks for a Job Description. The Manager copies the old one for the HR team to post. We then fall into a three month wait, finally we get some candidates and we use various voodoo hiring processes before selecting the best of the bunch.
The book acknowledges Recruiters and Researchers are a good way to source candidates, especially if you have a well-defined scorecard. This would also be true if you are new to the UAE region and haven’t built a network of contacts yet. During the research they discovered 77% of all CEO’s and HR professionals say the best source for finding talent is through referrals in your business or personal networks.
Start by asking your current A Players “Who are the most talented people you know?” Ask the same question through your business networks. Keep a virtual bench of talent. Stay in touch and if necessary follow their career moves until you have the right opportunity.
In the transient environment of the UAE we might find this too challenging. However, lots of people leave for new career opportunities and return again. If you have a specialist business and talent is difficult to find, following the A players in your field might save you time and money in the long run.
Select – here’s where the real structure arrives. There are four stages of interviews
1) Screening Interview – short phone based to clear our B & C Players. 4 Questions
- What are your career goals?
- What are you really good at professionally?
- What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally?
- Who were your last five bosses, and how will they each rate your performance on a 1-10 scale when we talk to them?
It should take anything for 15-30 minutes. You are looking for a match with your scorecard. They are doing all the talking. You can probe further under each question to make sure you’ve fully understood what they are sharing. You might need to do this with question 4). A great response to the usual, “I’m a bit of a perfectionist” or “I work too hard” – that sounds like a strength to me – what are you not good at?
But is it question 4) that is the sting in the tail. It is very specifically worded so that you get honest answers.
The book provides an opening script to set up the screening interview, so you have the complete how to guide. It should save hours of interviews where the CV looked good, but the candidate didn’t match their resume.
2) Topgrading Interview – A chronological walk-through of a person’s career. Beginning with highs and lows of educational experience and then five simple questions for each job in the past 15 years or however long years they have been working. It’s key to begin with the earliest job and work up to the present not the other way around.
Interview Guide
a. What were you hired to do?
b. What accomplishments are you most proud of?
c. What were some of the low points during that job?
d. Who were the people you worked with? Specifically:
i. What was your boss’s name, and how do you spell that? What was it like working with him/her? What will he/ she tell me where your biggest strengths and areas for improvement?
ii. How would you rate the team you inherited on a A, B, C scale? What changes did you make? Did you hire anybody? Fire anybody? How would you rate the team when you left on a A, B, C scale?
e. Why did you leave that job?
To make the Topgrading interview work you need to divide the person’s story into chapters. Each chapter should be 3-5 years in their career. You are looking to build a picture of the person and trends as they have grown.
A good Topgrading interview will take 3 hours, which seems like overkill. However it’s not if you are hiring key executive positions and a mistake could cost you millions. The interview should not be conducted by HR alone. This is the role of the line manager, but it does work to have HR or another colleague present – two heads are better than one.
They provide a launch script for the interview in the book (page 93) and a number of tactics for getting the most out of the interview. How to probe, interrupt and challenge with the three P’s which are about getting comparisons so that achievements make sense
3) Focused Interview – This is a follow up interview with another manager with a specific competency. It provides magnification on issues that might have arisen out of the Topgrading interview. It could focus on values or technical skills critical to the role.
It is not another Topgrading interview, so it must be structured and the interviewer is clear that they are not repeating the same 3 hour process. Again some focused questions are provided in the book and this interview is targeted at 45mins to 1 hour. You can do a number of them if the person will work with a big team of peers. It is your odds enhance
4) Reference Interview – this is critical and a step missed by so many companies. Smart suggests this is 25% of the information you should know about a candidate, so skipping means you don’t have the whole picture. They share three things to make sure you are doing references right:
a) Pick the right references. Don’t just use the list the candidate provides. You’ve asked their opinion during Topgrading and the screening interview of what their bosses will say. So pick the ones you are most interested in speaking to
b) Ask the candidate to contact the references you’ve chosen to set up the calls. It prevents you hitting a brick wall, and it can facilitate you actually speaking to them. You don’t want to get a written reference; you need to speak over the phone.
c) They recommend for senior executives you do seven references. They can be split between 2 or 3 colleagues. Interview three past bosses, two peers or customers and two subordinates.
Again they provide reference questions on page 107. The cleverest approach is to ask “What were the person’s biggest areas of improvement back then? The last two words liberate the reference to talk about weaknesses in the past, assuming that they might have corrected them by now. However the truth is people don’t change that much – so you are again looking for patterns and trends.
Decisions – Ultimately you take all the information gathered from the above processes and have a wash up session with all those involved. You grade the candidates and you’re asking which A Player has a 90% chance of achieving the results you expect in the scorecard.
Red Flags: When to dive beneath the surface
The book provides lots of examples and suggestions on how to probe and dig further during the above interviews. I found this list of red flags particularly helpful to make sure you delve further:
- Candidate does not mention past failures
- Candidate exaggerates his or her answers
- Candidate takes credit for the work of others
- Candidates speaks poorly of past bosses
- Candidate cannot explain job moves
- People most important to the candidate are unsupportive of change
- For managerial hires, candidate has never had to hire or fire anybody
- Candidate seems more interested in compensation and benefits than in the job itself
- Candidate tries too hard to look like an expert
- Candidate is self-absorbed.
The authors also included some behavioral indicators from Marshall Goldsmiths book What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There.
Sell – once you’ve selected the right A player for your job making sure you don’t fall at the last hurdle and lose them. There is a whole chapter on how to convince the right candidate to join you. In fact you are doing a bit of this throughout the process.
I found the book very simple to follow, the questions clear and enlightening – I look forward to the next recruitment opportunity to use them. A must read for anyone hiring senior executives
Listen to Hazel Jackson’s Book Review of ”WHO -Solve Your #1 Problem” aired on Dubai Eye 103.8